Love of Learning

Dom Gregory at Subiaco (2008) with students
Sara Munda and Quent Dickmann

Our series on the “Love of Learning” this year has turned to our monastery’s interest in education. We hope to explore some of our Benedictine heritage, as well as the perspective and experience of our community members with education. This week, we asked Fr. Gregory Havill to discuss his own educational experience. While Fr. Gregory retired from teaching a number of years ago, he remains connected with the School through serving as its chaplain. His teaching career has been lengthy, and this extensive experience has forged within him a distinctive approach to the classroom and to pedagogical theory and practice.

Dom Gregory started our discussion by noting immediately that he calculated that he worked in teaching for 54 years: “And I enjoyed the last day as much as the first.” That career began, he says, when he was more or less conscripted into teaching Visual Design, having no idea what he actually should do in preparation for the course. Nevertheless, selected from 64 graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, he found himself in front of the classroom – and discovered that he simply loved the job. He then soon found himself teaching art at Humboldt State, and then at Alma College in Michigan. Through his various professional engagements, Fr. Gregory looks back to trace an upward trajectory, a process of continued “tweaking” and improving. “This truly reached its highest point for me,” he says, “in teaching Christian Doctrine to the Sixth Form here at Portsmouth.”

Class outside

We encounter a kind of continuity across this journey, reaching back to his childhood education. We find in Fr. Gregory an individual who has consistently held an insatiable intellectual curiosity. It was an inherent interest thankfully identified and promoted by the religious sisters of his Catholic grammar school in Minnesota. “I am so grateful to Sister Agnes,” he remarks, as she had essentially provided the young student with “the keys to the kingdom” – access and opportunity to find and read all the library books he found of interest. This open-source approach to learning has carried over throughout his academic and intellectual career, enabling this trained artist to also teach at a seminary (Holy Angels), to incorporate physics and psychology into his courses, and to integrate all of this into a theology course centered in Sacred Art here at Portsmouth. The center of that center, he explains, was working to help theology come alive for the students through a kind of “reverse engineering,” one that would undo misconceptions and return students to the vital truths discoverable by them.

One of the first points Dom Gregory sought to make to students here at Portsmouth was to dispel from their minds the concept of theology as an isolated and dry academic topic. He draws on the historical insight articulated by Jean Leclerq, distinguishing the development of monastic versus scholastic theology. The former, the earlier and more fruitful form of theology, is rooted in prayer and contemplation. Scholastic theology, which Fr. Gregory associates with the later medieval period (“Aquinas is not guilty of it!”), eviscerated the vital contemplative context for an authentic theology, radically linked to a vibrant faith. He finds that the goal of education must not be dissociated from life, but is to illuminate a core anthropology within the Christian faith. This core he calls “deification.” Here he takes inspiration from a long contemplative and monastic tradition which he sees expressed in the Incarnational theology of St. Athanasius: “God became man that men might become God.”

It is a perspective he finds highlighted by Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, in a variety of his writings. Then Cardinal Ratzinger spoke of the need to rediscover a “kneeling theology.” The scholastic approach becomes problematic in that, as Ratzinger wrote, “a kneeling theology becomes a theology of the desk.” Fr. Gregory thus sees his work in education as encompassing a need to re-engineer the students’ concepts of theology to make of it not simply an academic discipline so much as an act of discipleship, of prayer, of living relationship with God. For one of his introductory handouts to his Christian Doctrine classes at Portsmouth, he wrote: “If you asked any of the Fathers of the Church what the central core of Christianity is, they would definitely not have said ethics or morality. Rather, they would have said deification. Deification is becoming conformed to the divine nature, becoming like God. This is God’s gift of His grace, His divinity.”

His work to enable students to encounter the Creator has been saturated with an inherent creativity. This is manifest in the many tangible projects he introduced in the classroom. Inspired by advice he received early in his teaching career, for example, he is a firm believer in keeping good alphabetized files, to be able to draw tangibly on material one has learned. This he asked of Sixth Form students, in the form of the accumulative binder each was to create. Students would then be asked to index their work, which served not only as an immediate pedagogical device, but also left them with a concrete memoir they could take away, for reference later in life. Such hands-on experience, as well as those we see in drawing and sculpting, inspired many of the concrete exercises he would ask of his students. When involved in the School’s Humanities trip to Rome, he provided students with a card on which they were to attempt their best drawing of St. Peter’s Basilica. He would then reveal to them that the sketch they had just produced was actually on a postcard, which they promptly were able to mail home to their families.